Tuesday, February 26, 2013

The Firefox O.S. – Mozilla’s latest thunder!

The Firefox OS, codenamed Boot to Gecko (aka B2G) has been launched quite recently and is a topic of speculation in tech-circles. This O.S. is uses a Linux kernel and runs HTML5 based apps (which couple up with the Firefox browser)

Firefox O.S. aims at controlling the hardware (integration) using JavaScript (now how cool is that!), and its basic reason for coming to existence is ‘to create a true OSS (open source) O.S. for which apps would freely be available on the Firefox Marketplace’.

The first Firefox O.S. based smartphones should be shipping as early as the the first half of 2013.

Mozilla is officially launching their Firefox OS for mobile phones and are proud to announce that they have deals with 18 carriers, a partnership with Qualcomm to use their Snapdragon chipsets and four manufacturers - ZTE, Alcatel, LG and Huawei. The first two also showcased phones with Firefox OS at the MWC.

Also, as per the latest reports, Sony is planning to launch its own Firefox O.S. based device in early 2014.

This could be a game changer for next year’s mobile technology (imagine the app development scenarios!)

Only thing which remains to be seen is how fast can market penetration actually help Mozilla, and oh, there is the current popularity of iOS and Android to add spice to the ‘market dominance race’ too!